[PHP-DEV] Three proposals for PHP 9

Mailing Lists php.internals
1

I came across this post on Reddit asking what people would like to see in the next PHP: https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/s/l9r8UJP6Rk

There are two major proposals I would make, both of which aim to greatly improve PHP’s competitiveness and ecosystem, while maintaining its spirit and what makes it great. And one minor proposal. I wrote them on Reddit, but then I realized I should actually do something about it. The last time I did something was in 2015 writing to the PHP list back then.

How do I get rights to create my own RFCs for these? I tried to do it on the web, but it says to ask on the mailing list. Here are my bona fides: I’ve spent about 20 years with PHP, to be honest, and the last 14 building an open-source community platform / CMS that competes with Facebook, Twitter, etc. and uses very idiomatic PHP. Here are two links in case anyone is interested
https://github.com/Qbix
https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

Anyway without further ado, I would like to present the two proposals:

First one: introduce switch_global_context($name)

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Sincerely,
Greg Magarshak

2

Gregory Magarshak greg@qbix.com hat am 29.07.2025 19:46 CEST geschrieben:

I came across this post on Reddit asking what people would like to see in the next PHP: https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/s/l9r8UJP6Rk

There are two major proposals I would make, both of which aim to greatly improve PHP’s competitiveness and ecosystem, while maintaining its spirit and what makes it great. And one minor proposal. I wrote them on Reddit, but then I realized I should actually do something about it. The last time I did something was in 2015 writing to the PHP list back then.

How do I get rights to create my own RFCs for these? I tried to do it on the web, but it says to ask on the mailing list. Here are my bona fides: I’ve spent about 20 years with PHP, to be honest, and the last 14 building an open-source community platform / CMS that competes with Facebook, Twitter, etc. and uses very idiomatic PHP. Here are two links in case anyone is interested
https://github.com/Qbix
https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

Anyway without further ado, I would like to present the two proposals:

First one: introduce switch_global_context($name)

I really love PHP’s shared-nothing architecture, but when it comes to frankenphp, swoole etc. it is very hard to port existing apps to that evented runtime. That is mainly because the superglobals and static variables are — well — global. You can have the best of both worlds.

Just add a function to PHP which can do context switching between all global scopes, to any named scope. So when you have one evented runtime, it can quickly switch. This should be easy to do with SHM (shared memory segments) and just pointing to a different page in memory.

The goal is to allow all “legacy” code (ie all current PHP code that runs on php-fpm etc) to be trivially ported to much faster runtimes, while remaining “shared-nothing” for all intents and purposes (global contexts would be isolated from one another because only one could be active at a time).

Second one: set_encryption_seed($name)

You might need to let people register functions to run before a context is saved (sleep) and after it is loaded (wakeup), when there is memory pressure, PHP can handle this in a standard way and even encrypt it at rest. You can also do this for session save/open handlers (which you already do).

Just have an environment variable or function like set_encryption_seed($seed) at startup of frankenphp or swoole.

Third one one: Improve func_get_args to return associative arrays.

I had this suggestion back in 2015 but maybe now it’s outdated. You see, functions typically start out having required arguments first, then add on optional arguments later. I thought based on how PHP passes arguments, it would have been trivial to enhance func_get_args to return an array indexed not just by numeric values but also string values!

And therefore one could pass arguments like in python: func(2, 5, $foo => $bar, $baz => $choo) It also would look exactly like the familiar array composition syntax. But this is no mere syntactic sugar. It helps developers fall into the pit of success by creating backward-compatible interfaces and making any function extensible, improving the entire ecosystem.

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Third one one: Improve func_get_args to return associative arrays.

Thanks for the suggestions. Maybe add a new function func_get_named_args(): array<string, mixed>, would be a good extension to the named arguments rfc.

Regards
Thomas

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Sincerely,
Greg Magarshak

3

Thanks for the suggestions. Maybe add a new function func_get_named_args(): array<string, mixed>, would be a good extension to the named arguments rfc.

I even wonder if this would require a RFC? If not, this is something
that may be proposed for PHP 8.5.

Best,
Alexandre Daubois

4

That would be great.

To be honest, the biggest bang cod the buck would be switch_global_context. Just that alone can turn all existing php code into something that can be adapted to evented programming (amPHP, reactPHP, Swoole and FrankenPHP).

As it is, only Latavel Octane and a couple other projects have dared to redo everything. And the reason is all the static functions, static vars, global vars, superglobals etc. If one can just switch global contexts with switch_global_context as easily as they can switch sessions with session_start, that would be a game-changer.

Of course then we have the question of too many contexts in memory at once, so we do need to serialize them to disk, and that’s where I think encryption-at-rest can be transparently introduced, with a key specified at start. It can also be re-used for storing session data and lots of other data. Just another example of PHP nicely taking care of things for us (like it automatically hydrates the superglobals for us etc.)

This is idiomatic PHP, it is shared-nothing and is the only web hosting runtime that’s actually safe by default — safe from leaking secrets, memory, etc. across requests. These two functions can keep it that way, leveraging all the code that’s already been written assuming shared-nothing (php-fpm) and making it work in the evented paradigm, where leaks can happen.

If we do this, I can see php developing an ecosystem of asynchronous drivers just like node has, for I/O with callbacks (using select() underneath in POSIX systems for example). Already the amphp and other ecosystems have the basics: https, mysql, etc. But the advantage would be that PHP would remain safe, by having devs build on all the existing code that relies on its shared-nothing architecture (from Wordpress to Drupal to Magento to Joomla to our platform etc.) and just making it 10x faster and evented

Until then… I guess I’ll just use curl_multi and batch requests together clunkily through closures.

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Sincerely,
Greg Magarshak

https://github.com/Qbix